The present invention relates to the field of automatic target recognition.
A typical synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target detection/automatic target recognition (ATD/ATR) system may include three stages: a pre-screener/detection stage; a discriminator stage; and a classifier stage.
Stationary targets detected using rotating radar arrays may cause cross-range streaking in the images produced by the SAR, wherein unwanted bright detections/bright pixels/“on” pixels corresponding to the rotation of the radar array are produced in the radar image. Cross-range streaking on the target may cause a decrease in the accuracy of both a position estimate and a pose estimate of the target calculated in the second level discriminator (SLD) of the ATD process. For example, the length, height, and/or width estimates of the target may be corrupted by the cross-range streaking, thereby leading to poor/inaccurate ATD scores.
Prior attempts to deal with SAR target chips/images with cross-range streaks caused by rotating radars include searching all possible pose values to obtain a best match with ATR models or templates. However, such methods may result in longer software run times and a higher rate of false target identification declarations.
Other solutions have included the modeling of cross-range streaks into the ATR models/templates. This solution, however, also typically results in longer software run times, and further requires a larger database.